I've been largely unhappy about Adobe Creative Cloud. Personally, I don't think it is fair to the huge numbers of freelance photographers, graphic designers, web designers, etc. who have effectively built their entire livelihoods on Adobe software. I think that Adobe, with a $50/mo fee for the full CC Master suite and $20/mo per-app fee, is greatly taking advantage of freelancers unmitigated and everlasting dependence.
That said, I decided to give the PS CC + LR5 $10/mo deal a try. It was the first deal that Adobe offered that seemed reasonable (we'll see if it stays that way in a year), and I wanted LR5. I still own PS CS6, and I prefer to use it as my primary editor...with SELECTIVE use of PS CC. Well, I've learned a few things, and I thought I'd warn people.
First off...Adobe CC is infectious. By that, I mean, once it is installed, the CC versions of it's products take over any automatic integrations and file associations. If you double-click a .psd, it opens in CC, rather than CS6. Worse, if you use LR, whenever you open images in Photoshop, it always opens in CC. The worst part is...there seems to be NO WAY to configure LR (either v4.x or v5.x) or other Adobe apps to use the Photoshop version of your choice...your STUCK with CC, unless you uninstall it...and then, you have the hassle of getting CS6 working again. Frustrating, and annoying...Adobe should allow their users to choose which version of Adobe products are used, rather than automatically forcing you to CC.
There is a deeper, more malicious demon lurking within Adobe Creative Cloud, however. I stopped using the .psd format a while ago. I never seemed to need the extra information that .psd stored over and above .tiff, so I switched to .tiff. As such, I NEVER expected that saving .tiff files created with Photoshop CC would not function properly in Photoshop CS6. I thought that since I was using a universal format, they would be compatible with anything that could load .tiff files.
Well, this plain and simply isn't true. An example is using smart objects. I use smart objects with stacked images, along with tweaking the stacking mode (usually mean & median), to do some pretty amazing noise reduction with still frames (macro, landscape) and astrophotography frames. Thanks to the issue described above, some of my recent astro stacks were done in PS CC, rather than PS CS6. I tried to open these .tiff files in PS CS6, and while they opened, they did not render 100% correctly. The issue? The "renderer" for the smart object stacks could not be found. PS CS6 supports exactly the same stacking modes, but Adobe cleverly changed how they store that information in .tiff files...so it is no longer backwards compatible.
So the warning here is, BEWARE! While Adobe says you can open files saved with Creative Cloud apps, they have apparently "tweaked" a few things here and there to make life difficult for those who try to get around their insane monthly fees and use their "bought and paid for" previous versions. Even if you save in universally supported file formats such as TIFF, your file compatibility is NOT guaranteed. You can work around some of these issues, but just beware...there may be some "tweaks" to how CC apps save data that might permanently bind a perfectly normal TIFF file to that CC app, preventing its use in a prior version.
This is the kind of maliciousness that I was afraid Adobe would employ. To my great dismay, it seems my suspicions were correct. The truly frustrating thing is, I cannot afford the extremely hefty upgrade prices for some of the apps I need to upgrade, such as Illustrator and Premier. Even worse, in many cases, my versions for some apps like Premier are too old to upgrade (CS3 era), and I'm required to pay full price. So, my options are to either subscribe to CC, and get locked in forever...or shell out an unholy amount of cash for a product I already own, but for which I simply need an upgrade. Despicable. Adobe is rapidly becoming my most loathed company.
Anyway...BEWARE...
That said, I decided to give the PS CC + LR5 $10/mo deal a try. It was the first deal that Adobe offered that seemed reasonable (we'll see if it stays that way in a year), and I wanted LR5. I still own PS CS6, and I prefer to use it as my primary editor...with SELECTIVE use of PS CC. Well, I've learned a few things, and I thought I'd warn people.
First off...Adobe CC is infectious. By that, I mean, once it is installed, the CC versions of it's products take over any automatic integrations and file associations. If you double-click a .psd, it opens in CC, rather than CS6. Worse, if you use LR, whenever you open images in Photoshop, it always opens in CC. The worst part is...there seems to be NO WAY to configure LR (either v4.x or v5.x) or other Adobe apps to use the Photoshop version of your choice...your STUCK with CC, unless you uninstall it...and then, you have the hassle of getting CS6 working again. Frustrating, and annoying...Adobe should allow their users to choose which version of Adobe products are used, rather than automatically forcing you to CC.
There is a deeper, more malicious demon lurking within Adobe Creative Cloud, however. I stopped using the .psd format a while ago. I never seemed to need the extra information that .psd stored over and above .tiff, so I switched to .tiff. As such, I NEVER expected that saving .tiff files created with Photoshop CC would not function properly in Photoshop CS6. I thought that since I was using a universal format, they would be compatible with anything that could load .tiff files.
Well, this plain and simply isn't true. An example is using smart objects. I use smart objects with stacked images, along with tweaking the stacking mode (usually mean & median), to do some pretty amazing noise reduction with still frames (macro, landscape) and astrophotography frames. Thanks to the issue described above, some of my recent astro stacks were done in PS CC, rather than PS CS6. I tried to open these .tiff files in PS CS6, and while they opened, they did not render 100% correctly. The issue? The "renderer" for the smart object stacks could not be found. PS CS6 supports exactly the same stacking modes, but Adobe cleverly changed how they store that information in .tiff files...so it is no longer backwards compatible.
So the warning here is, BEWARE! While Adobe says you can open files saved with Creative Cloud apps, they have apparently "tweaked" a few things here and there to make life difficult for those who try to get around their insane monthly fees and use their "bought and paid for" previous versions. Even if you save in universally supported file formats such as TIFF, your file compatibility is NOT guaranteed. You can work around some of these issues, but just beware...there may be some "tweaks" to how CC apps save data that might permanently bind a perfectly normal TIFF file to that CC app, preventing its use in a prior version.
This is the kind of maliciousness that I was afraid Adobe would employ. To my great dismay, it seems my suspicions were correct. The truly frustrating thing is, I cannot afford the extremely hefty upgrade prices for some of the apps I need to upgrade, such as Illustrator and Premier. Even worse, in many cases, my versions for some apps like Premier are too old to upgrade (CS3 era), and I'm required to pay full price. So, my options are to either subscribe to CC, and get locked in forever...or shell out an unholy amount of cash for a product I already own, but for which I simply need an upgrade. Despicable. Adobe is rapidly becoming my most loathed company.
Anyway...BEWARE...
